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Explore how smartphone automation apps like iOS Shortcuts, Samsung Modes & Routines, Tasker, and IFTTT can be exploited for surveillance and harassment in intimate partner violence scenarios through this 15-minute conference presentation from USENIX Security '25. Examine a systematic analysis of four popular automation platforms and their potential for abuse, including capabilities that enable monitoring, impersonation, overloading, and controlling victims. Learn about the research methodology used to evaluate 12,962 publicly available Shortcuts recipes, which identified 1,014 potentially malicious automation scripts designed for surveillance and harassment purposes. Discover the inadequacies of current notification and logging mechanisms in these platforms that fail to adequately warn victims or help them identify abuse sources. Understand the detection mechanism developed by researchers to identify potentially harmful automation recipes and gain insights into proposed mitigation strategies for both users and platform providers to address these security vulnerabilities in automation applications.
